My Favorite Books from 2016; or, a Christmas Book List for Your Early American History Nerd Friends

2016 sucked in a lot of ways. Future historians will likely give lots of attention to this year and its events, and not with a positive assessment. But while we cope with this new reality, we at least can console ourselves with the fact that it was an excellent year in historical scholarship, especially in the field of early America. This post is a sequel to my Christmas Book List I posted last year, and may very well become an annual tradition. Below you’ll find some of my favorite books from the past twelve months.

Just a few of my favorite books from the past year.

However, I should quickly add, these were far from the only excellent volumes to be released. (Like I said: it was a very strong year.) These books reflect my own interests and background. I hope others will share their favorite books, whether mentioned or not, in the comments.

This was the year of sweeping surveys–big books that challenge traditional and entrenched narratives. (They should also encourage us to revise a lot of our survey textbooks.) Two of these texts are follow-ups, in a way, to Alan Taylor’s classic American Colonies (Penguin, 2001), which was the first of Penguin’s survey series and set a new barrier for inclusivity and exhaustiveness. The first of these new surveys, Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (Norton), is not part of the Penguin series, but it is a fitting and worthy sequel to Taylor’s previous volume, and is now the standard overview of the period. (I wrote about the “continental history” approach it invokes here.) And following up Taylor’s work in the Penguin series, Steven Hahn’s A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (Penguin) is equally expansive and incisive. (See a recent overview in NYT here.) Though only half of Hahn’s work deals with the pre-Reconstruction period, his imperial context is indicative of where scholarship of the nineteenth century has gone in the past generation.

What is “The Junto?”

The Junto is a group blog made up of junior early Americanists—graduate students and junior faculty—dedicated to providing content of general interest to other early Americanists and those interested in early American history, as well as a forum for discussion of relevant historical and academic topics.